Intergenerational Transmission in the Age of Postmemory: Rebecca Makkai’s Music for Wartime

Rebecca Makkai’s short story collection Music for Wartime (2015) features thirdgeneration characters, like the author herself, who revisit the familial trauma narratives of the Second World War in Transylvania. The collection’s postmemorial dynamics therefore relies on the first generation’s lived experience mediated in transmission and the third generation’s new aesthetic concerns in reinterpreting them. However, the increasing generational distance in our postmemorial age has caused the traumatic narratives to reach the third generation by affiliative transmission at the same time as it has universalized and mystified the victim and the survivor. In Makkai’s collection, the fixed narratives mediated by the first generation and the past that is universalized by affiliative transmission demand a return to family narratives with a non-familial perspective. The collection’s unity is established by a form closer to a short story cycle. In accordance with the form, the stories sequentially reveal how the contemporary subject responds to familial and affiliative transmission. The collection’s intertwined dual structure encapsulates the strained connection between embracing and questioning the transmitted narratives. This article argues that, with its specific form, Rebecca Makkai’s Music for Wartime problematizes and symbolically resolves the question of intergenerational transmission within the dialectic of familial and affiliative memory.